django-cs-archive

A date-based archiving system (YYYY/MM/DD) for Django applications.

This package wraps Django's powerful generic date views into a plug-and-play solution. It follows the "Convention over Configuration" philosophy: just add a few lines to your settings.py, and you're ready to go.

Features

• 📅 Full Hierarchy: Year, Month, and Day views.
• ⚙️ Centralized Configuration: Managed via settings.py, similar to AUTH_USER_MODEL.
• 🔌 Plug-and-play: No need to write complex views or URL patterns manually.
• 🐍 Compatibility: Supports Django 3.2+.

Installation

Install via pip:

pip install django-cs-archive

Configuration

This is the most important part. Follow these three simple steps:

1. settings.py

Add the app to your installed apps and define which model you want to archive.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ... other apps
    'django_cs_archive',
]

# REQUIRED: The model to be managed by the archive
# Format: 'app_label.ModelName'
CS_ARCHIVE_MODEL = 'blog.Article' 

# OPTIONAL: The name of the date/datetime field in your model
# Defaults to 'publish_date' if not set.
CS_ARCHIVE_DATE_FIELD = 'pub_date'

2. urls.py

Include the archive URLs in your project's main URL configuration. You can choose any prefix you like (e.g., news/, archive/, blog/).

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    path('archive/', include('django_cs_archive.urls')),
]

3. Prepare your Model (models.py)

Your model (defined in CS_ARCHIVE_MODEL) must satisfy at least two requirements:

1. Have a Date or DateTime field (matching the name in settings).
2. Have a Slug field (named slug) to generate unique URLs.

It is highly recommended to add the get_absolute_url method to easily generate links in your templates:

from django.db import models
from django.urls import reverse

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    slug = models.SlugField(unique_for_date='pub_date') # Important for data integrity
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField()
    content = models.TextField()

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        # Generate the URL 
        return reverse('detail', kwargs={
            'slug': self.slug,
        })

Usage

Once configured, the following URLs will be automatically available (assuming you used the archive/ prefix):

• /archive/ -> The year list.
• /archive/2024/ -> All months with articles from 2024.
• /archive/2024/03/ -> All days with articles March 2024.
• /archive/2024/03/15/ -> All articles from that specific day.

Customization (Templates)

The package has templates that extend your "base.html" file and uses the {% block content %} block to show the content. To customize the look and feel, create the following files in your project's templates directory:

• templates/django_cs_archive/archive_year.html
• templates/django_cs_archive/archive_month.html
• templates/django_cs_archive/archive_day.html
• templates/django_cs_archive/archive_detail.html

License

MIT License.